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50/255 chance of a imp
40/255 chance of a demon
30/255 chance of a spectre
30/255 chance of a mancubus
30/255 chance of a cacodemon
24/255 chance of a hell knight
20/255 chance of an arachnotron
10/255 chance of a revenant
10/255 chance of a pain elemental
9/255 chance of a baron of hell
2/255 chance of an arch-vile

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The idea is that they are all demonic; zombies are produced by possessing humans, not spit out from the bowels of hell.

Or maybe id were concerned about the danger of an intercepts overflow if they allowed a way for huge numbers of hitscanners to appear together. Or about the possibility that someone could survive indefinitely (but without figuring out how to exit) thanks to the dropped ammo.

In general my view is that id were guided more by practical considerations than anything else (at least, after Tom Hall left). If they had thought it would have been a cooler game finale with hitscanners, I bet they would have put them in.

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Grazza said:
Or maybe id were concerned about the danger of an intercepts overflow if they allowed a way for huge numbers of hitscanners to appear together. Or about the possibility that someone could survive indefinitely (but without figuring out how to exit) thanks to the dropped ammo.

They made DOOM II pretty fast, so I don't think they went into such technical depth, and instead stuck to simpler design principles.

I also doubt they even knew about that bug. We know about it after years and the demos from many players, and also years of playing around with the code, as opposed to just finishing it up as well as possible with a more or less scheduled deadline. Less so that they considered it in the scenario, since the map seems designed as a quick finale. Romero couldn't believe someone had done a NM run through all of DOOM II, were they to believe it would be possible for someone to survive indefinitely, or for a long time, in Map30? It's not like you can hide anywhere.

I've played DOOM many times in many years, and I never triggered the overflow that causes noclipping when there are many hitscanners. Not that I remember, at least.

It seems the boss was Romero's idea, and while quite a "gamer" he seems rather imaginitive designwise. It's really Petersen who gave the impression of "the design, whatever, lets just make it fun" likely mostly due to a more detached involvement (being a hired hand as opposed to a company member) and to the fact that he was hired to produce a lot of maps quickly (so he didn't have time/interest to be nitpicky or professional); at least in regard to his map design.

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I got my first intercepts overflow really recently, while playing slayer.wad map06 in PrBoom+ .27. I was going through one of the imp staircases when the warning popped up and I was free to go 'out-of-bounds'.

That map certainly doesn't have a high monster count, not to mention a high number of hitscanners.

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They might have noticed in testing at some point that a lot of hitscanners can lead to weird problems. And if you have the icon spawning them, and the player not knowing what to do, then you can get a lot of them quite quickly.

Belial: Intercepts overflows are admittedly rare in normal play, but perhaps the reason you have got so few (given that you like monster-heavy maps) is that you haven't been using Doom2.exe all that much. The emulation was only very recently added to Prboom+, so it won't have been possible in earlier versions or in other ports. If you play Nuts, then an overflow will occur quite readily. And on NM it is likely.

It's true it can also happen where there aren't lots of hitscanners, but it does seem to make it more likely.

myk: Probably not indefinitely, but they may have feared people would be more likely to think they were meant to "fight it out" if they had dropped ammo to help them. With a strictly limited supply, it's much more obvious that there is some other solution.

BTW, I have always found the notion that Doom2 was made "very quickly" a little odd. If you compare it with the development time for Doom(1), given that the whole game content and engine needed to be created too in that case (not to mention the tools), then it doesn't seem overly fast.

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Grazza said:
BTW, I have always found the notion that Doom2 was made "very quickly" a little odd.

Commercial games are always rushed jobs, relatively speaking; my comment is in regard to the exposure that we have to the game now. Whether or not there was any more rushing with DOOM II over DOOM can perhaps be gleaned from comments by the id guys.

Plus, if these oveflows were such a factor, why did they not just fix the bug?

Though perhaps we should ask John (Romero) if he remembers why the Boss doesn't shoot zombies.

In my mind any good designer takes both extraneous design elements (such as aesthetics and the story) and the game mechanics to produce a game, and often the extraneous ones set the scenarios within the available technical possibilities, while the game mechanics are used to correct and forge the planned scenario once it is being developed, and then these two elements start playing back and forth. I doubt that when they thought of a huge demoniac head that spews monsters from the depths of hell they considered initially making it shoot zombies; whether the initial concept was reinforced by some game mechanics (such as leaving behind ammo being distracting, or, more importantly, hitscan shots being problematic to the player with no hiding place and reduced mobility on the pillar while holding a Rocket launcher) is another matter, but I quite doubt that the game mechanics were the telling factor there.

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I agree with Myk besides it's just a wall, as the bosses in DOOM it's supposed to be a serious character, not just a "spawn 'em all". The first thing that comes to mind is that it's the demon spawner, the main origin of the invasion, while the zombies are humans from Earth. It would look way too odd, childish, simple in terms of design if it spawn even them.

I think id didn't payed much attention to the posible bugs of that sort, more important I think it's the bug that may cause the game to crash if you save and load in that map.

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I made an experimental map, with a courtyard that contains 100 spawn spots (128 units apart in 10 rows of 10) and each spot was added one after another. The boss shooter is behind the player's starting position. The courtyard is blocked off by a midgrate cage so the enemies don't move. Once 100 monsters have been spawned after 7 minutes or so of waiting I freeze the game and count each monster individually on paper.